Still mad as hell – and I’m all in favour of that
SIMPLY for theatrical spectacle, you are unlikely to find a show to match Network at the Royal National. Director Ivo van Hove throws every trick to keep the eye entertained.
Howard Beale is a struggling US TV anchor, a poor man’s Walter Cronkite. Told his career is over, he throws an on-air wobbly, ranting at the awfulness of the world.
The viewers are so gripped, Beale’s job is saved and he becomes a national celebrity as the man who told Americans ‘I want you to get mad’.
Soon thousands of them are shouting out of their windows ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this any more’. Or as we said last year, vote Brexit. And the Americans said, vote Trump.
The Lyttelton stage has been divided: one side is a TV news studio with a glass box for the producers; the other side has cabaretstyle seating where some audience members are fed and given drinks.
On-stage cameras relay the action to a big back screen (with distractingly out-of-sync sound/lip movements). The presence of film footage takes us a move away from the sto- ry’s characters. Bryan Cranston is superb as the craggy, deranged Beale.
He is a ringer for City PR man Roland Rudd, who was in the first night audience. Now there’s a massager of the news!
But despite the play’s message about the importance of ‘the complexity of people’, we do not get to peer much inside Beale’s soul. The TV executives around him engage in corporate politics but apart from a broken marriage sub-plot (a good turn by Douglas Henshall), it is all rather metallic. Network TV types, in my experience, tend to be a great deal more snooty.
Michelle Dockery is well cast as icy Diana, a hard-bitten producer who sees that Beale’s madness could be saleable.
Consider the Jeremy Kyle show and this story, originally a 1976 film, may seem visionary.
But hang on. Its writer, Paddy Chayefsky, was passing stinging comment on the power of network television – which has now been surpassed by the internet.
I’m all in favour of people ‘getting mad’, and it was fun to sense the Establishment audience at the National quivering at the fiery polemic. But for all the presentational brio from director van Hove, is it possible this show itself is hyping a story simply for ratings purposes?